January 11, 2019
Susie Claire was born on January 11, 2019, at Liberty Hospital. She was delivered by C-Section at 7:52 in the morning. The C-Section was due to this being my third child, and I had previously delivered via cesarian. Susie weighed 7lbs and 3 oz and was absolutely perfect. It was an extremely snowy weekend in Kansas City. We snuggled in the hospital as we watched the Chiefs beat the Colts 31-13 to advance to the AFC Championship game. It snowed the entire game, we reportedly had over 12 inches!
By age 1 Susie was hitting every milestone and was walking at about 13 months. She was beginning to mimic sounds and communicate. Susie was always a happy baby and loved to smile. Shortly after Susie turned 1 in 2020, COVID shut the world down. We were forced to shelter in place, and therefore, much like other kids her age, Susie rarely left the house. By the time my older kids were this age they had been to several restaurants, the zoo, you name it, we went. Susie did not have this experience, therefore when I started to notice her language delay, I chalked it up to the fact that she hadn't had real-word experiences and she would just need a little extra help to make up for lost times. Slowly over time, we started to notice that Susie was not developing her language skills like she should. At first, I didn't panic, after all this isn't the first child, I have had with a language delay. My son, Sam also struggled, with language development, reading, writing, and math. At this point, Sam was a success story, he had overcome so much and exceeded all expectations. Since I had the success story of Sam, I just kept waiting for the day that Susie's language picked up and she caught up to where she needed to be.
Day by day we began to put in extra work with Susie, hoping to help her gain communication skills. By the age of three, we were still waiting with little to no progress in verbal communication. She was slowly starting to use gestures and was becoming self-sufficient, so words weren't overly necessary for her. Still, we waited, prayed, and hoped communication would come soon.
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